As my friends at Wabash returned to our campus for another semester of liberal arts education, I realized that I’ve been in Beijing for a little bit less than a month now. I still clearly remember the excitement I felt when I was taking a taxi from the Beijing Capital International Airport to my Chaoyang apartment. Since my host, Khurram Tahir’01, was travelling at that time, I was completely on my own for the first 10 days. I have to admit that I was a little bit nervous knowing that I will have to face language and cultural barriers without any form of organized assistance. However, I thought that there is a unique value to this challenging experience. “If I can make it here within the next few weeks, I will be able to make it anywhere” I thought during the cab ride.

It turned out that with the help of Beijing friends I made during my first few days here, I was soon on my way to pursuing my January and February goals. Because my study abroad program at Fudan University doesn’t start until March, I wanted to primarily learn as much Mandarin as possible within those two months, acquire a better understanding of the Chinese culture, get to know Beijing, and prepare for the part-time BD Medical Shanghai internship.

I’ve been taking Mandarin classes for over three weeks now. Thanks to my very good teachers, I am already able to communicate a little bit in Chinese. This has been very helpful to my survival here, from everyday grocery shopping to trying to strike up very simple conversations with the wedding guests. It also helped me during my exploration of Beijing. As the capital of China and home to 12 million inhabitants, Beijing offers quite a lot, almost anything can be found here. On Sunday, for example, I attended afternoon mass in English at one of the Beijing Catholic churches. So far, my experience here has been very positive. I’m looking forward to spending one more month in Beijing. This weekend I will be finishing up my Dill Grant application, which I really hope will allow me to study Mandarin in China in the summer prior to my return on the campus.

My first week abroad has been nothing short of awe-some. I have already seen, heard, and experienced so many new sights and sounds of the Italian culture than I could have originally imagined.

I spent my first evening at a dinner on a balcony right beside the majestic heights of the Duomo of Milan, a massive cathedral towering over the surrounding buildings. I couldn’t believe it was real when I first saw it; its sheer size made me think it looked like an oversized model designed for the Lord of the Rings movies.

I’ve spent my other nights exploring the local transportation system, finding new ways to get to and from my apartment. Along with a complete subway system, buses and trams link the various concentric circles of the city. Taxis and motorbikes constantly zip past at insane speeds, squeezing into uncomfortably close quarters with other moving vehicles, usually going another direction. I don’t think I’ll ever utilize that type of transportation.

For the most part, however, I’ve stuck close to my apartment and the surrounding area, going out for groceries and school supplies. Trying to immerse myself in the culture is still really important to me, but for now much of my time and effort has been spent establishing a reliable "home base" while I’m here. The smallest things, such as how to use the washing machine, how many grams of meat to buy, and whether or not 8,50 Euros a month for decent phone coverage is too much to spend, have taken up the majority of my first week.

Does this mean I’m doomed to remain cloistered in my room for the next three months? No way. Not a chance. It’s taken me more time than I expected to get used to general living, but that’s not gonna stop me from venturing outside the city — and eventually the country — to play a few games of REAL football with the locals.

Plus tonight was a good sign: I cooked my first genuinely balanced meal since I got here. Polposa red sauce over penne pasta with some ground beef from the deli, next to an oil and vinegar salad and italian bread and grapes. Not bad, eh? I’ll get the hang of this whole "Milan" thing in no time.

During the second week of my stay in Beijing, I had a chance to discover a part of the Chinese culture not available to every study-abroad student. Apart from my efforts to learn Mandarin and get to know the city, I did something very unique: I had the pleasure of participating in a traditional Chinese wedding celebration.

This event took place in Zhuozhou City (涿州市) just outside of Beijing. In the company of my Beijing friends, I arrived in Zhuozhou on Saturday afternoon. We had a fantastic dinner with many Beijing dishes and I got to know the wedding couple as well as some of the guests. The actual celebration took place on Sunday morning. I was fascinated by all the different customs I was observing, but also a little bit nervous: my role at the ceremony was to read the official Chinese marriage certificate in front more than 200 wedding guests. Considering I’ve been learning Mandarin for just two weeks, this was a very interesting task. My friend Li Xin (李欣) wrote the text in pinyin (a Romanized system for Mandarin pronunciation) the evening before the wedding. I practiced doing the best I could to get all the tones right (Mandarin is a tonal language.) The result can be seen in the video below. The wedding guests said that they were able to understand me, which I consider a huge success 🙂

Overall, the wedding celebration was very different from the western weddings I attended, but it was very interesting and everybody was extremely friendly and hospitable. So far my time away from the Wabash campus has been eye-opening and truly unpredictable. Beijing as the capital of China is a great environment to learn the language. I am very thankful to Wabash for this opportunity and am also looking forward to all the things I will experience in the months to come, especially as my semester at Fudan University and my BD Medical internship start in March.

A semester spent off-campus can be an important part of the liberal arts education one receives at Wabash. It allows to explore academic areas not available in Crawfordsville. In my case, these are Mandarin and the Chinese culture. Almost exactly one year ago, I was selected to spend the spring semester of my junior year representing Wabash College at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. I am deeply thankful to Wabash for this amazing opportunity and plan to do my very best to make the most out of it. Therefore, I flew to China shortly after the end of the fall semester, even though my program at Fudan does not start until March. I will spend the two months prior to the beginning of the Fudan semester intensively learning Mandarin and helping Wabash admissions recruit future Wabash men in China. This early arrival would not be possible without the generous help of Khurram Tahir’01. Mr. Tahir greatly helped with all the pre-departure preparations and provided me with a place to stay: his fabulous 28th floor modern apartment located in the Chaoyang district of Beijing.

As I already mentioned, I will do my best to make sure that I am taking full advantage of the time I spend in China. Apart from being a student at Fudan University in the spring, I will also complete a part-time internship with Becton, Dickinson and Company, a global medical equipment producer. I will be working at their Chinese headquarters located in Shanghai. I received this remarkable internship offer from Greg Spencer’76, BD Business director for Asia-Pacific. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Spencer in Beijing on Thursday. We drank coffee and Chinese green tea while discussing the nature of work at Becton Dickinson. I am very thankful for this internship opportunity and will work hard to significantly contribute to BD Shanghai.

Since Wabash does not offer Mandarin classes, I am also currently preparing my application for the summer project Dill Grant available to Wabash students through the generosity of Michael Dill ’71. I would like to stay in China for the summer in order to learn as much Mandarin as I can before returning to Wabash for my senior year.

I devoted my first week in Beijing to learning Mandarin, getting to know the city, and making local friends. I survived a record snowfall and witnessed China dethroning Germany as world’s biggest exporter. Being a native of Upper Silesia, the most urbanized region of Poland, I really feel at home in the Beijing metropolis. It’s a great environment to learn the language. Chinese people are

friendly as well as extremely helpful and patient with foreigners who try to learn their language. I really feel that that this spring (and hopefully summer) will be a life-changing experience.

I’m finally here. After three long weeks of Christmas Break, my trip to study abroad in Milan begins. I know why I’m going abroad this Spring semester: to pursue film studies courses through another culture’s point-of-view. I know what airport I’m flying into, where my apartment is, who I’m rooming with, and how much I will have to spend in the first week. I have the equipment necessary to shoot video for this blog. I’m as ready as I can be for this trip, which starts tomorrow.

But to be honest, I have NO idea what to expect over there.

Don’t blame Wabash. David Clapp in the Off-Campus Study office has helped me get all the way up to this point, including helpful tidbits and factoids that will prove quite helpful once in Italy. Howard Hewitt in the PR department hooked me up with video-editing software, with which I can develop some nice footage into quick, informative, and realistic insights into the fashion capital of the world. More than anything, my liberal arts background will help me adapt and adjust my own assumptions, which I will improperly and inevitably apply.

There is simply no amount of preparation nor any pre-designed method that can make the transition from one culture to another fully seamless. The "acculturation process", a fancy phrase for the transmission, acquisition, and understanding of another culture compared to my own, is not a switch that I can just flip. It is, as noted, a process, and it will take time.

In view of this, I am nothing less than excited. This journey will not only aid my studies in film, but also broaden my understanding of Italian cultural viewpoints, identifying what specific ideals or customs I assume as standard for people of all nations. My personality will take on a new Italian twist, and my creative writing will persist and flourish. Above all, Italy will change me, and the change will benefit me for the rest of my life.

As the author D.J. MacHale states in the prefaces of his grand Pendragon novels: Hobey ho. And so we go.